SOURCE: “Recent Irish Fiction,” in The Dublin Magazine, Vol. 6, No. 1, Spring, 1967, pp. 75-8.

In the following essay, Harmon presents a brief overview of the Irish novelists Patrick Boyle, Edna O' Brien, John Broderick, Richard Power, and Andrew Ganly.

So much attention has been given to the happy resurgence of poetry in the past ten years that the position of the Irish novel has almost escaped attention. Poets tend to gain recognition more easily, since their work appears in the national newspapers and in the little magazines. And it would almost seem that it is only when a novel runs foul of the censorship laws, is profaned by the hands of the customs officials, or earns its author expulsion from his profession that the novelist comes into public focus. Nevertheless, the exciting fact is that Ireland now has a number of good and promising novelists. And the evidence of...